the healthcare 'trigger' is a snowe job

[spanone]

it is putting off healthcare reform

it is saying that the problem will be dealt with later i.e. never.

snowe job

[bkkyosemite]

1. Call your Senators and Congressmen today and tell them that. I just did.

[Why Syzygy]

2. It's a concession to our masters.

Corporates. In this case, corporate insurance. There is no way to call them "health care". They are moguls.
No better than war profiteers.

[spanone]

4. the trigger is a way of delaying any reform...in a few years they will have the 'trigger' in court

[closeupready]

5. that is EXACTLY what it is.

It's taking those sunset provisions and turning them on their head. It's bullshit.

[spanone]

6. hoping the thugs retake congress and/or white house and totally eliminate the program

which they would do in a heartbeat while telling the democrats to go fuck themselves

[grantcart]

3. we can talk about it if she brings us the names of 25 Republican Senators

who will back the bill with a trigger.



They want to 1) delay the effects of the bill so that it won't have an impact on the election next year and 2) they want to be able to run against our Senators as voting for a socialist medical bill.


IF they want a trigger let them come up with some big time political cover - will never happen.



To consider a trigger to get one little vote is idiocy.

[bain_sidhe]

7. Actually...

if it's the kind of trigger Suzy Khimm speculated about, we could do worse. Of course, we could do much, much, MUCH better.

What Would Snowe's Trigger Look Like?
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/what-would-snowes-trigger-look

First, the government would establish a standard of "affordability" --yet to be determined--that would gauge whether Americans had access to reasonably priced health insurance, based on their income, family size, employer-backed benefits, subsidies, and so forth. Then, on a state-by-state basis, the government would test to see whether enough people--about 95 percent--had access to affordable coverage according to this standard. And if the private reforms alone weren't enough in a given state, a government-backed "safety net option" (as Snowe prefers to call it) would be introduced into the state's health insurance exchange. The fall-back option--which would essentially be the same government plan wherever it was implemented--would be run by a non-profit organization that would serve as a kind of a hammer over private industry to make sure it will perform.

Notably, Snowe wants the government to make this determination as far as a year before the insurance reforms actually go into effect (around 2013 in the Baucus plan/HELP bill). The idea is that private insurance companies would have to release their pricing and bids well in advance, so we wouldn't have to wait and see if the system fails to make coverage affordable.

(emphasis mine)

Bottom line, I'd feel more comfortable with a trigger that would go into effect at the same time as the plan does, and especially so if the "option" being triggered is something stronger than we could get through Congress without a trigger. Granted, there's a lot of room for mischief in the definitions of "affordable" and "access," and a lot depends on the design of the public option, but I'm not prepared to say I wouldn't settle for the kind of "triggered" public option discussed in this piece.